SetSync

Inspiration

Every film you have ever loved was made possible by one person standing in the dark at 5am holding a set together with paper and walkie talkies.

That person is the Assistant Director. And for 40 years, nothing has been built to help them.

I spent 23 years on East African film sets as a writer, director, producer, and AD. I have worked on productions for M-Net, Showmax, and international broadcasters. I wrote and produced the first Kenyan audio drama to win an International Emmy Award. I have handed out paper call sheets in the rain. I have coordinated 40 departments on a single walkie talkie channel. I have written wrap reports at midnight from memory after 16-hour shoot days.

I did not build SetSync because I saw a market opportunity. I built it because I was the market, and I was exhausted.

The Problem

The global film and television industry generates over $400 billion in annual revenue. Every single dollar of that passes through a shoot day — the most time-pressured, most expensive, most chaotic environment in any creative industry.

And that shoot day still runs on two tools unchanged since 1985.

The paper call sheet. Typed the night before. Distributed via WhatsApp PDF. Wrong by 6am. When an actor is delayed, a location falls through, or weather forces a pivot — the AD has to retype, reprint, and manually chase 40 people across departments. On a production burning $5,000 an hour, that manual process costs between $2,000 and $10,000 every time it happens.

The walkie talkie. Rented at $300 to $500 a day. Voice only. Nothing logged. Not every department gets one. No record exists after wrap. When picture wraps, the entire coordination history of that day vanishes.

The rest of the production pipeline has been transformed by software. Pre-production has StudioBinder and Movie Magic. Post-production has Frame.io and DaVinci Resolve. Distribution has Netflix and every streaming platform ever built.

The shoot day has nothing. Until now.

What SetSync Does

SetSync is the first live coordination operating system built to operate inside the shoot day. Not before it. Not after it. Inside it.

The AD updates once. Every crew phone updates instantly. Every decision is logged. The wrap report writes itself.

AI running in production today:

AI Call Sheet Generator — upload a script and the system reads it, extracts every scene, every cast member, every location, every prop, and every time of day automatically. A call sheet that used to take 3 hours to build takes 60 seconds. (Claude API)
Photo OCR for Daily Sheets — point your phone at a handwritten daily continuity sheet and SetSync reads it, extracts the data, and logs it to the production record. The camera is the keyboard. (Gemini API)
Smart Day Pivot — when an actor is delayed, the AD taps one button. SetSync surfaces every alternative scene that can shoot with the cast currently on set, ranked by location and setup time. What used to take 45 minutes of mental calculation and phone calls takes 4 seconds.
Auto Wrap Report — at picture wrap, SetSync generates the complete daily production report from the live data captured during the shoot. Scene completion status, deviation from schedule, cast call times, department notes. Zero manual entry. The AD is done in 8 minutes instead of 2 hours.

Live coordination features:

Push-to-talk walkie channels per department over WiFi and Bluetooth
Live cast board — every crew member's status visible in real time
Rolling Mode — one tap silences every phone on set simultaneously
16-department structured broadcast signals
Digital continuity with stills by scene
Crew discovery marketplace — ADs find crew, crew find productions
Cast sides view — actors see only their scenes for the day
Offline-first with Bluetooth mesh for remote locations with no signal

The business model is simple: Crew access is always free. The AD pays. SetSync's Indie tier at $99 a month costs less than one day of walkie talkie rentals. It pays for itself before lunch on the first shoot day.

How We Built It

SetSync was built by one person — a 23-year film veteran with no technical background — using AI-assisted development tools.

The entire product was conceived, designed, architected, and shipped in 11 days. Not a prototype. Not a demo. A working production-grade app with a real backend, real-time data sync, push-to-talk audio, and AI features running in production.

Stack: React/TypeScript frontend, Supabase backend, Netlify for the marketing site, Claude API for AI script analysis and wrap report generation, Gemini API for photo OCR and continuity scanning, GitHub for version control, AWS for cloud infrastructure.

What AI made possible: The gap between domain expertise and technical execution has collapsed. A founder who knows the problem deeply can now build the solution directly. SetSync is proof of that thesis — built by the person who lived the problem, using AI as the technical execution layer.

Live since April 27, 2026. First production pilot May 25, 2026.

Challenges We Ran Into

Building real-time coordination infrastructure that works reliably on low-bandwidth connections is genuinely hard. Film sets are often in locations with poor mobile signal — warehouses, rural locations, old buildings. SetSync uses Bluetooth mesh networking as a fallback so the app keeps working even when the internet doesn't.

Designing for 16 departments simultaneously without overwhelming any single user required a completely different information architecture than a standard productivity app. A camera operator needs to see different information than a location manager. The AD needs to see everything. Getting that role-based information design right took more iterations than any other feature.

Shipping a production-grade app as a solo non-technical founder using AI-assisted development meant trusting a new development paradigm entirely. Every architectural decision, every product logic choice, every user experience decision was made by someone who had never written a line of code. The fact that it works — and works well — is the most important proof of concept SetSync has produced.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

Shipped in 11 days. Live beta partnerships with Africa Digital Media Institute Nairobi, ADMA Rwanda, and FilmAid Kenya — the institutions that train the next generation of ADs across East Africa. First production pilot confirmed May 25 with one of Kenya's most sought-after ADs.

An International Emmy-credited founder built the tool she needed for 23 years — and shipped it in less than two weeks using AI.

The film school pipeline is the most defensible distribution channel in the industry. Every student AD who learns SetSync in school becomes a professional AD who pays for it on set and recommends it to every production they work on for the next 30 years. We are not just building a product. We are building the infrastructure that the next generation of filmmakers will run on.

What We Learned

AI-assisted development collapses the gap between domain expertise and technical execution. The person who knows the problem most deeply can now build the solution directly — without a technical co-founder, without an 18-month dev cycle, without burning runway on salaries before a single user has touched the product.

The most important insight: the founder who built this in 11 days will not slow down. Every iteration cycle is measured in hours. Every user insight from the pilot becomes a product improvement within days. The velocity advantage of AI-native development is not a one-time event. It is a permanent structural advantage.

What's Next for SetSync

Immediate: Native iOS and Android via React Native. Full app store distribution. Payments via Paddle and M-Pesa.

Next 6 months: Crew discovery marketplace — SetSync becomes the platform where ADs hire crew and productions find ADs. Commission on bookings turns coordination infrastructure into a production network. Smart Location Pivot AI — when a scene is cancelled, SetSync surfaces alternative scenes that can shoot in the same location or nearby, with cast and crew already on set.

12-24 months: US market entry starting with California and New York indie film communities. Enterprise contracts with production companies and studios. The $10M ARR story.

Series A vision: A dedicated SetSync set device — combined phone, walkie, and call sheet hardware built specifically for film sets. Ruggedised screen, built-in push-to-talk button, offline-first mesh networking. Rented per production like a camera. No personal phone required. This hardware layer creates a defensible moat that software-only competitors cannot replicate.

Every film you have ever loved was made by a crew who deserved better tools. SetSync is those tools. The shoot day just got easier.